Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?

https://nicole.express/2023/the-third-dimension-and-the-eight-bits.html

by robin_reala • 3 years ago

129 64 3 years ago

nicole.express

gwbas1c• 3 years ago

One thing I wish is that the parts of the 3d image were also side-by-side instead of (or in addition to) moving.

I trained myself to look at these kinds of things cross-eyed so I can see the 3d effect without glasses.

jayd16• 3 years ago

Even just speeding up the flicker would induce a more 3d effect.

efnx• 3 years ago

I wish there were more sites like Nicole express. Great job with the break down.

genpfault• 3 years ago

Not loading for me; archive: https://archive.is/hjChf

binarymax• 3 years ago

I had the (dis)pleasure of using these as a kid. Gave me a wicked headache.

But awesome writeup! Reading how they worked I finally understand why I got the headache :)

ChuckNorris89• 3 years ago

Hey, at least you got to experience the ...puts on shades... Segaverse.

allenu• 3 years ago

Did you ever try plying them without the glasses? Now that’s a headache!

I had a Master System as a kid and was disappointed when I purchased Maze Hunter 3D and brought it home only to find I could not play it without the glasses. No wonder they were discounted.

However, I did read in a book that Space Harrier 3D had an Easter egg that allowed you to disable the 3D feature, but you had to get on the high score screen to execute the code. I ended up buying that at a discount. I got quite good at getting through the first level of the game without the 3D glasses.

nsxwolf• 3 years ago

Zaxxon 3D also let you turn off the 3D. Not sure why all the games didn't. There's no good way to play them today without the peripheral and a CRT.

cholmon• 3 years ago

I had a Master System as well, but my glasses broke early on in my ownership, so I played Maze Hunter, Blade Eagle, and Missile Defnce without them. Eventually, I got accustomed to the odd look of everything being slightly doubled. When I finally got a new pair of glasses that worked, the 3D gameplay felt so odd that I preferred playing without them.

ytreyrty3• 3 years ago

will 3D/VR ever really become mainstream? i recently bought a PSVR2, the tech seemed amazing but i had to return it due to horrible motion sickness. we're at almost 30 years of the tech still not being ready for prime time.

edent2• 3 years ago

Not until they overcome the need for the viewer to do something.

Moving from mono sound to stereo doesn't require anything of the listener. Going from black and white to colour doesn't require you wear special equipment.

But 3D? You have to put on special glasses which you also have to remember to charge. Oh, and you can't look at other things while you're using them.

There were some passive 3D displays (the Nintendo 3DS and a few early Android phones) but they required the user to stay in exactly the right position, or the illusion was destroyed. So you couldn't easily share the experience with a friend.

Until we have TVs which can shoot lasers directly into our eyeballs, I think the barrier to entry is too high.

sudosysgen2• 3 years ago

These kinds of VR headsets don't need to be charged (they are wired) and you can press a button to see the real world through the cameras.

dweekly• 3 years ago

Note there are several active participants in the equipment-free 3D display space: usually by building head tracking (so the display is "single player" - can only accommodate one viewer at a time) and clever separated left eye / right eye projection.

EDIT: Apparently ASUS has a laptop that does this too! https://www.asus.com/content/asus-spatial-vision-technology/

vlunkr4• 3 years ago

The other thing about mono->stereo and monochrome->color is that they were backwards compatible. And even when creators adopted the new style, they didn't fundamentally change what they were doing.

With VR, the majority of popular games can't be ported 1:1 to VR. It either adds nothing so it's not worth it, or motion sickness requires removing or reinventing movement. It's almost like starting game design over from scratch.

ytreyrty3• 3 years ago

yeah on the VR side apparently im supposed to undertake a training regimen to be able to tolerate it without feeling sick. this is on top of the already massive commitment of wearing a giant helmet on my head. of course none of this is mentioned on the product page. (to be fair sony has a very generous return policy on these, probably for that reason)

it's unfortunate because VR GT7 was really cool until i started feeling horrible, but the sickness was very strong like from riding on a spinning carnival ride. i had to lie down the rest of the evening each time it happened.

frosted-flakes• 3 years ago

The New 3DS has eye tracking and doesn't require you to stay in one spot. It's still single-user, but it is significantly more stable than the original 3DS.

Tommstein2• 3 years ago

But 3D? You have to put on special glasses which you also have to remember to charge. Oh, and you can't look at other things while you're using them.

Passive 3-D glasses exist, and you can very much look at whatever you want while wearing them.

There were some passive 3D displays (the Nintendo 3DS and a few early Android phones) but they required the user to stay in exactly the right position, or the illusion was destroyed. So you couldn't easily share the experience with a friend.

I had an HTC EVO 3D, and would kill to get that technology back. If friends and I can only look at stuff in 2-D at the same time, fine, nothing lost over the current status quo. But looking back at your pictures and videos in actual 3-D immerses you in the moment again in a way that's hard to describe.

vlunkr4• 3 years ago

It's very popular right now, but it's really hard to tell if it's just a fad. Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off. It will be interesting to see.

dylan604• 3 years ago

Motion controls had a huge wave of popularity starting with the Wii, but that died off.

is there a consensus to why this is? was it just a fad/phase, or is it just too physically demanding so people literally and figuratively tired of it?

alliao• 3 years ago

I blame Nintendo... it's rare for a next gen to perform worse than previous gen, but that's what happened to wiimote, the supposedly "HD" joycon just don't have enough fidelity when compared with Wiimote, I doubt it performs better than wiimote when tracking in air.

bullen6• 3 years ago

The PSVR2 has persistence problems due to the pancake lenses taking up too much light. Basically the strobing can't be short enough (to not induce smear) because that would dim the picture too much. It makes everyone sick.

The top of the line is still Quest 2, the display (120Hz) and fresnel lenses are better than most more expensive alternatives.

And with DAS FrankenQuest you have comfort.

Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!

I do not expect the Quest 3 to deliver much benefit over the 2. Maybe the Quest 3 lite they are talking about.

Surprisingly the Quest 2 is still DDR4 and has the same GFLOP as a 1030.

tomxor• 3 years ago

I can attest to quest2 not being motion sickness inducing, although I don't have any comparative experience.

There is also the issue of subjective motion sickness sensitivity that seems to conflate comparisons, some seem to get sick in any VR with certain games or environments, and everyone gets sick in some specific VR headsets. If you don't get motion sick easily, quest2 is pretty comfortable, and once you find some decent games it's unique and re-playable, more than a mere novelty.

Lots of folks on HN seem to have tried one thing once at some point in time - either got motion sick or got confused why the onboard graphics sucked, and then just relegated the whole category to "still broken". VR works if you can be bothered to do as little research as you do for your next PC.

Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!

I don't get what you mean by native though, there are loads of native quest games.

tanjtanjtanj2• 3 years ago

The PSVR2 does not have pancake lenses nor persistence problems. It also has fresnel lenses and 120Hz refresh rate.

I think there are only a couple headsets with pancake lenses at this point in time. Supposedly the PSVR2 has more advanced fresnel lenses than prior headsets of the same kind as well but I'm not versed enough in the technology to know.

havblue• 3 years ago

I think people usually realize how pointless and uncomfortable it is every time they try it.

"When you look at a 2-D movie, it's already in 3-D as far as your mind is concerned. When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward you across the desert, are you thinking, 'Look how slowly he grows against the horizon'? Our minds use the principle of perspective to provide the third dimension. Adding one artificially can make the illusion less convincing."

-Roger Ebert: Why I Hate 3D Movies https://www.newsweek.com/roger-ebert-why-i-hate-3d-movies-70...

voxelghost• 3 years ago

I think something that also plays into this is the fact that 3D content producers, in their efforts to "show off" 3D capabilities, insist on breaking the 3:d wall by putting stuff into the viewers room, where they don't belong(mentally). I think this is why, to me, 3D movies look less "realistic" than 2D movies.

It would be interesting to know if the "less realistic" effect was also something experienced by viewers at the time of the shift between monochrome and color movies. And if it was overcome by technology improvement, or by viewers simply getting used to the new media.

musha68k• 3 years ago

You might have hit the “age wall” there, not enough “training” with VR also usually doesn’t help.

The younglings I know all loved the PSVR2 experience much more so than the Quest which they were fans of before. So therefore probably more attuned, highly plastic brains to boot.

I also get motion sick sometimes. It depends on the game, cockpits usually are fine. Those are the ones I’m more interested in anyways. PSVR2 is a literal game changer IMHO.

grumbel2• 3 years ago

Given how things have been going, I don't think VR will hit mainstream until the resolution (PPD) of the headsets can compete with a TV/monitor. One of the main problem with VR right now is that it cuts you off from all the 2D content out there, the resolution is too low to browse the Web and watching movies in what is essentially less than 720p isn't great either. On top of that, most VR headsets just don't work as full monitor/TV replacement to begin with, due to not having a plain old HDMI input. The software side is also severely lacking, while it's possible to bring 2D content into VR on PC, it's extremely clunky and not well supported at all. Microsoft's WMR tried to build a "Windows desktop for VR", but with that dead now, it'll take years before anybody will try that again.

The lack of resolution could of course be overcome by native VR content, that is build towards the other strengths of those headset. But there just doesn't seem enough interest in the industry to actually go that route, you can still count the total amount of good AAA content for VR on one hand. That's not enough to attract gamer's in mass and in turn developers aren't all that interested either. Xbox still staying away from VR isn't helping either, as that cuts off a large chunk of the potential market too.

As for motion sickness, that's a somewhat unsolvable problem. Everything that makes the virtual body move without your real body moving will make people sick, no matter how good the headset is. One solution is to not move the virtual body (teleport locomotion), but that drastically limits what games you can do in VR and has been largely abandoned again by most games. The other alternative is to just get used to it, most people can adopt to some degree, but it can take time. I think the only real solution here is a generational shift, once every kid grew up with VR, the motion sickness issue might fade away, but that'll still take many years or even decades.

mardifoufs• 3 years ago

240p is fake and a lie, but close enough for us

I want to know more :) and my googling skills are failling me. But I didn't even realize you could do 240p/60hz on a CRT. To be honest I even assumed that CRT more or less means interlaced for some reason...

Edit: ok, I should've clicked the links in the article! This page pretty much completely answers my questions!

https://nicole.express/2021/interlace-me-not.html

Tommstein2• 3 years ago

Man, you used to be able to write X modelines to get CRTs to do just about anything you wanted as long as they were physically capable of it. I think it was an ancient version of this guide that I followed many a time to get a new CRT up to . . . let's call it peak performance: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOW...

p1necone2• 3 years ago

There's actually custom AMD GPU firmware called CRT emudriver for older cards that still had analogue output to push custom modelines to CRTS: http://geedorah.com/eiusdemmodi/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=1009...

It's used in the retro gaming community to get hardware accurate video output from emulators.

richardjam73• 3 years ago

That article reminds me of a certain question I had recently. Is it possible to design a crt type video display that doesn't suffer from phospor loss?

p1necone2• 3 years ago

For anyone else curious the TLDR is that 240p is really 480i with tweaked timings so that the lines from the two interlaced frames strike the screen in the same place.

This is also why a lot of old 240p consoles (NES/Master System through to PS1/N64/Saturn ) look even worse on modern TVs than you would expect them to - the TV tries to deinterlace the signal, but it's not really interlaced. With a 240p aware linedoubler converting your signal to 480p HDMI you can get much better results, and much lower latency.

computronus2• 3 years ago

My favorite project ever in undergraduate was getting these glasses to work with a PC. We got the specs (pun intended) from online resources and a how-to VR book published at the time (mid-90s). My partner designed / assembled the circuit board to interface the glasses to the PC's serial port, and I wrote a display driver that would switch video pages and simultaneously trigger the glasses to flip shutters. The result was 3D on a PC screen.

The demo program was a robotic arm simulator that my partner already had on hand, since it could easily render wireframes. The updated simulator rendered two wireframes of Optimus Prime, so with the driver in place, he floated in front of the screen.

And, of course, you could rotate him in space, and then hit the space bar to transform him in 3D.

Melraidin2• 3 years ago

Was it this book? https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1990755

I hacked up a Powerglove to connect to my PC. Always wanted to get the Sega glasses too but didn't have the resources at the time.

computronus2• 3 years ago

I think it was this one, The Virtual Reality Construction Kit by Gradecki. The cover looks very familiar!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3165591-the-virtual-real...

Twirrim• 3 years ago

I don't remember who produced them, but I had a pair of active shutter 3D glasses back in something like 2000, maybe? I think they were Elsa Revelators.

All I remember of them was that when they worked they were brilliant, albeit a little dim. Mostly all they did, though, was expose all the shortcuts developers took, particularly with UI elements. Everything in the scene would be wonderful 3D, but the UI elements would be all over the place, distorted, etc. etc.

Asooka• 3 years ago

Regarding the LCD problem: Don't you simply have to align the signal sent to the glasses with the LCD frames? You don't need the full delay, as the switching is rhythmic, so you only need up to 1 frame, or 1/30th of a second. I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to build an analogue device with a knob to control the delay, after which you just turn it to whatever position shows the appropriate image for each eye.

toast0• 3 years ago

I think you'd need up to 2 frames. Up to 1 frame lets you line up to the vblank more or less, and the 2nd frame lets you pick which eye. Might be able to do it with an adjustment for the delay and a switch to toggle the eyes.

Edit: if you happen to have a 3d tv still, it might be possible to tell it you've got frame sequential 3d content and then use its glasses. Possibly.

w-ll• 3 years ago

So this is how the active Nvidia Gforce glasses work. Most references are scrubbed from their site now, I had a pair and the monitor and they were actually pretty great.

I also posted a plea in the thread the other day about dumb tvs [2]. There are passive 3d stuff with bad viewing angles. But I do love my 3d content and dont mind glasses.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140325101340/https://www.nvidi...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484594&p=4#35488578

pazimzadeh• 3 years ago

Kind of related: most people can generate a stereoscopic image by crossing their eyes

https://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/crosseyed.shtml

Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?

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